Local elites who collaborate with a colonizing power are implicated into the colonial state matrix in different ways. In a field of multiple collaborating elites, marginalized collaborators outwardly desire similitude towards other collaborators through integration. But given an opportunity to disengage from a trajectory of integration, these marginalized collaborators would readily do so. As to why these leaders of the marginalized would choose to disengage from the hegemonic narrative of the colonial state is the problematic of this investigation. Following the history of Moros in the Philippines as context, and with the analysis of the Piang family as a case study, I posit that the Moro subject was 1) created through the process of colonial state building during the American regime and was internalized by the Moros leading to the colonial encounter-produced subjects; 2) that the Moro subject inflected ideas of difference that enabled them to disengage at the moment of possible excision from the emerging body politic. I illustrate this by using the year 1926 wherein Mindanao and Sulu were nearly separated from the Philippines. I posit that the process of subject formation related to the project of state building and the deployment of a cultural repertoire peculiar to them was the reason why the Moro elites under consideration disengaged from the hegemonic narrative of political independence.